1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of searching multimedia data, and more particularly to a method of searching multimedia data more accurately by utilizing user feedback.
2. Background of the Related Art
Recently, technology for digital image signal processing has been greatly developed and has been applied in various fields. For example, the digital image signal processing technology may be used in a search system for automatically editing only the face of a specific character in a moving picture file of a movie or drama, in a security system for permitting access to only persons registered in the system, or in a search system for searching a particular data from an image or video detected by a detection system. The performance of such systems basically depend on the accuracy and speed of detecting or searching the desired object. Accordingly, various image searching methods have been proposed in the related art.
An image search system which detects a degree of similarity with an image to be searched utilizing features such as color, texture or shape is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,579,471 entitled “An image query system and method.” Depending upon the image to be searched, the importance of a feature may vary and within one particular feature such as the color, the importance of a feature element such as the red or green color may also vary. However, the above searching system does not take into consideration the different importance of features or feature elements for each image to be searched.
In another searching method entitled “Virage image search engine” (www.virage.com), a user directly inputs the level of importance for features such as the color, texture and shape by assigning weight values. Although an image may be searched according to an importance of a feature using this method, it may be difficult for a user to determine the weights of features.
Therefore, Yong Rui in “Relevance feedback techniques in interactive” SPIE Vol. 3312, discloses a method in which images similar to a reference image are found and the importance of features or weight for features are automatically obtained by calculating the similarities among the found images. However, the weight importance information is not maintained after a search for a specific image is finished and must be calculated for each image search, even for a same image.
In the image search and browsing system or the video (moving image) search and browsing system of the related art, information which describes a particular feature of an image or video data is utilized to perform a more effective search or browsing of the multimedia data. For example, in the image query system, an image may be divided into a plurality of regions and a representative color of each region may be utilized as a feature information of the image, or a whole color histogram of the image may be utilized as a feature information. Thereafter, two images are compared to calculate a similarity based upon the feature information and a determination is made whether the two images are similar.
Therefore, the image search methods in the related art may utilize weights of features such as color, texture, or shape. However, weights of feature elements are not taken into consideration. Accordingly, the image search methods in related art has the limitations in intellectually training and developing weights for searching, resulting in relatively longer searching period to obtain search results and a deterioration of the reliability of the search results.